I have come to like more pop music over time too. What I found though is that I don’t tend to attach much to music unless it has something unique to it, so have found myself going for bands like Pixie Paris which is very poppy but still a bit different.

Comparing huge multinational countries which serve every country to the half of countries with the smallest energy usage is not terribly illustrative.

Misinformation. An article not as blatantly trying to manipulate people: https://www.ign.com/articles/ubisoft-exec-says-gamers-need-to-get-comfortable-not-owning-their-games-for-subscriptions-to-take-off?utm_source=twit

That’s OK, I sicken and horrify me, too

It’s spelled “copyright”, not “copywrite” btw :P

If you federate with something too massive though it has undue weight on the entire system. It is likely to be Embrace, Extend, Extinguish again, and it’s reasonable to want to avoid that.

For people who don’t remember, the pattern would be something like:

1. Federate and use the existing ecosystem to help you grow and to grow mutually (Embrace)
2. Add new features that only work locally, drawing users away from other instances to your own (Extend)
3. Defederate - the remainder is left with a fraction of the users since many moved away, so the users on the local instance don’t care. (Extinguish)

It depends whether 2 actually succeeds at pulling users in. Arguably most people already on the Fediverse are unlikely to jump ship to Facebook, but you have to consider what happens in a few years if it’s grown, but Facebook is a huge name which makes people less likely to join other instances.

Never knew the details of this!

Surprised no-one said <your lemmy instance here>

The social construct of race is which features we consider important enough by which to categorise people. So in the USA, this is white, black, asian or hispanic. Maybe native. Those categorisations are based on real observable traits, but we could choose other categorisations. It notably groups together traits which we can easily distinguish and pull out as subdivisions, such as south-east Asians.

We could redraw these groupings: we could for example together north Africans, middle-easterners and Indians, separating out those from southern and central Africa. We could separate Europeans so that Scandinavians, Finns and Slavs are together, separately from western and southern Europeans.

Damn this couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past months how it used to be that when you disagreed with someone, you’d still have something shared with them. Not quite the same as the social media aspect, but when TV was all broadcast on a few channels, you’d probably find a show in common. When the only news was national newspapers and broadcasters, you might both be reading the same paper but disagreeing on the articles. My thinking was going down the lines of “this meant everyone had a shared truth” which is kind of like the social media bubble that the research seems to disagree with, but also down the lines of “this meant everyone had, to an extent, a shared identity” at least within a large group like a country, linguistic or ethnic subdivision.

There was something special about the old internet. The idea that the acrimonious disagreements might have been less bitter due to their nature is tantalising. There’s also something to bear in mind for Lemmy: the old internet, as much as the interest groups it spawned, was united by a shared interest in the internet specifically - and technology in general. The internet wasn’t as necessary and ubiquitous, so most people there had to have some other motivation to be on it. That itself was a shared interest that allowed people to find commonality. Lemmy is the same: people here are a subsection of the internet, brought here because they’re drawn to openness not provided by unfederated platforms. That is its own commanlity, and it won’t exist if Lemmy outgrows those other platforms.

Do you support the legalisation of cannabis or other drugs?

If you’re hosting it, prepare to get sued out of existence!

This is a bit trickier with heat pumps because they are not very good at delivering a lot of heat energy quickly, especially if you need a large temperature increase because you enjoy a nice hot shower (I have my boiler set to heat water to 65 degrees for a comfortable temperature at the shower head, though could set it a bit lower.) There are various ways around this but a common one is storing water so you don’t have to heat it quickly or using an old-fashioned electric shower so that the heat pump doesn’t need to be oversized. You don’t get the extra efficiency of a heat pump, but showers aren’t the majority of domestic energy consumption; heating is.

There are other arguments for water tanks, of course - as a millenial you may not be thinking about a house with a large family, but it’s similarly inefficient, even with a gas boiler, to heat water on demand for many bathrooms and radiators all at once and you’re better off having a (large!) water tank. “Inefficient” here not in terms of the amount of gas used, but the amount of boiler.

Not only that but several of them are a bit weird looking (sorry to those people…) as in, 37 and 47 have obvious asymmetries, 31 is a bit bug-eyed, 18 seems to have been taken with a super telephoto lens or have a really flat face.

Where I am there are no fixed-for-the-life-of-the-loan mortgages, so I will have to remortgage at a higher rate in 2025. I expect by then things will have calmed down a little from the worst this year, but will still be significantly more expensive than they are now. However, I will have had five years paying very low interest rates (about 1.6%) and am overpaying. It makes more sense than renting and the place I bought has been a great place to live during the pandemic. I don’t know how much the value has increased since I bought it - despite small falls though the wider area has seen average property prices go up about 25% over this time so I’m not in any danger of being stuck unable to move. Even if prices collapsed I would likely be safe from negative equity due to having had a large deposit.

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These popups are worse than the actual pop-up ads - at least those were in separate windows or tabs and so could be closed easily with keyboard shortcuts.